A“skyscraper” was a fitting accessory for Amarillo’s 1920s ambitions.

A century ago, Amarillo was experiencing an oil boom. But at the beginning of 1925, Polk Street, the showplace of the city’s ambitions in those days, looked largely the same as it had a decade before.

That wasn’t the case outside of town. The continued development of enormous reserves of natural gas that were first tapped in Potter County in 1918, combined with 1923’s big oil strikes in nearby Carson and Hutchinson counties, was transforming the scrubby ranch land that once surrounded the city like an ocean of grass. 

As 1925 headed to a finish, a select few decided the time had come to look the part of a booming city. And what better place to start than Third Avenue, at Polk Street, where Henry Sanborn first laid out his audacious plans for growth in the late 1880s? It was in this lower downtown area that Amarillo got downright citified that year, more accurately reflecting the city’s growing financial status and setting the stage for a rapid transformation of the skyline in the years to come. 

Just a year before, C.T. Herring (known honorifically as Col. Herring) erected the five-story Palo Duro Hotel a few blocks east at Third and Fillmore. Its size and modern look no doubt piqued the interest of his fellow business and civic leaders who wanted in on the action. Back on Polk, another hotel owner who answered to colonel, Col. Ernest O. Thompson, couldn’t let Herring outdo him. 

Thompson’s military title was not honorary—it was attained in the service of Gen. John “Black Jack” Pershing in World War I when Thompson was promoted to lieutenant colonel. After the war, he purchased the Amarillo Hotel, which had grown up with the city from humble, timber-framed beginnings to a stately brick edifice fronting Polk. With business booming and his hotel suddenly feeling dated, Thompson decided it was time to play the Kansas City card. He called up the architectural firm of Shepard & Wiser to design a sizable addition to the existing Amarillo Hotel structure that would welcome guests by September 1925.

The Kansas City architects were no strangers to Amarillo. The firm had already designed several stately homes in the city, and with the Amarillo Hotel addition, architect Albert C. Wiser saw an opportunity to stick around and play an ongoing part in fashioning a skyline that would properly advertise Amarillo’s big city ambitions.

What Amarillo lacked was a skyscraper, which in those days could mean a building with as few as eight to 10 floors. With so much oil flowing in, exploration companies and related businesses were proliferating in Amarillo by 1925 and seeking out modern accommodations. And likely these companies wanted to work close to one another to keep an eye on the competition. Building up was the best way to go.

Things moved fast, and though he was already overseeing a big construction project at the hotel, Thompson revealed in January 1925 that he was also building an office tower across Polk Street with Wiser’s firm handling the design work. With help from investors that included future Amarillo Mayor Ross Rogers and noted businessmen such as Guy C. Saunders, Thompson envisioned a building that would be Amarillo’s tallest structure, briefly anyway.

On New Year’s Eve, Thompson’s Amarillo Building opened as a single tower with Polk Street frontage and a main entrance along Southeast Third Avenue. Within a year, another virtually identical tower would rise to the south, joined to the first through a common ground floor and a bridge spanning all floors midway across the length of the rectangular towers. It created an H-shaped building that was both functional and easy on the eyes.

The Amarillo Building’s big opening on Dec. 31 competed with, or possibly merged into, a New Year’s Eve bash across the street at the newly expanded Amarillo Hotel. Surely someone danced in the streets that evening. The following Monday, Amarillo’s top business professionals rolled up their sleeves inside new, modern high-rise offices. Just about every profession a boom town required was represented: doctors, lawyers, insurance agents, financiers and of course, oil and gas companies. Wiser even opened a branch of his Kansas City office in the Amarillo Building. His work in the Panhandle’s capital city wasn’t done.

Though the Amarillo Hotel and the Amarillo Building didn’t wind up as Amarillo’s grandest and tallest architectural monuments of the 1920s, Thompson’s 1925 contributions to the skyline rose like stakes on a claim of promise that felt more sure than ever before. Just one New Year’s Eve later, C.T. Herring would go on to win the blue ribbon for building height with his 13-story Herring Hotel several blocks east at Pierce Street. Herring must’ve been impressed with what he saw at Third and Polk because he picked Wiser to design the Herring Hotel and Thompson to run it.

In 1926, Thompson expanded the Amarillo Hotel once more with a 12-story tower that made for good TV when the venerable old hotel was imploded in a live broadcast in 1978, making way for an expansion of T. Boone Pickens’ Mesa Petroleum. It was Pickens, however, who rescued the neighboring Amarillo Building from oblivion with a 1980s makeover. Current owners, former Mayor Ginger Nelson and her husband Kevin, have put even more shine on Amarillo’s first tall building, highlighting its historic details and earning it Texas landmark status and a listing in the National Register of Historic Places.

The Herring Hotel, later refitted for offices, emptied out in the 1980s and still awaits redevelopment. Meanwhile, downtown has seen an upswing in fortunes and has plenty of room for a future architectural statement to back up our ever-changing ambitions. Keeping Amarillo dressed for success is a multigenerational task.